MacDorman and his team plan to use results from objective sources like heart rate, galvanic skin response, electroencephalograms and functional magnetic imaging of the brain to gauge how far designers can go before characters creep out viewers.

Researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., recently discovered that patterns of electrical brain activity, as measured by electroencephalograms, usually are different among creative thinkers than among more methodical problem solvers.